Try a few searches on this page to zero in on what you find interesting and actionable and also note the volume. For example, Twitter search returns the 15 most recent results by default, so look at the oldest result to see how long it took to produce 15 tweets for your particular search. Although volume will change over time, this gives you a starting point to measure the volume that SocialMiner will be collecting for your search.

Once you are satisfied with your search, you need to convert the search URL to a Atom/RSS feed URL. Twitter redesigned the search.twitter.com API, which removed the RSS feed icon on the link—you now need to construct URL yourself. Copy the end of the URL from search/twitter.com and paste it after the following:

There is an advanced tab that allows you to implement more complex keyword searches—when you execute a search from the advanced tab it converts into the Twitter search notation. There is also a page that explains the search operators.

A few notes on the advanced search:

The location criteria only provide exact results for Twitter users who have turned on geotagging, which is not common. If geotagging is not turned on, Twitter will leverage a user's stated location in the profile. This might not be useful in most situations.

If your team handles only posts in a certain language, they will find the language filter to beuseful.

Additional Tips:

To find all of the tweets directed at an account, search for "@username". This allows you to monitor all of the public Tweets directed at an account without having to authenticate that account. If you are the account owner, set up a "Twitter Account" feed on SocialMiner instead of using RSS. The Twitter Account Feed will capture all of the mentions (@username) as well as the direct messages (private messages).

If you are looking for Tweets related to three products, you have the option of creating one Twitter search for all three products and configuring that on Socialminer as one feed. Alternatively, you could create three Twitter searches and configure three feeds on SocialMiner. One search for all three products is a bit simpler to set up and maintain on SocialMiner because it is a single feed, but if you intend to put the three products into different campaigns, you would set up a feed for each product.